Two weeks after riling up a crowd of Trump supporters with claims of election fraud ahead of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn tried to rehabilitate his stance on the presidential election on Saturday night—only to have his entire argument fall apart in spectacular fashion.
Pressed by CNN’s Pamela Brown to explain what evidence had motivated him to contest the election results in the first place, Cawthorn visibly struggled to string together a coherent argument.
“The things that I was not objecting to the election on behalf of was things like Dominion voting machines changing ballots, or these U-Haul trucks pulling up filled with ballots for Joe Biden as president. The thing I was objecting for is things like, like I said in the state of Wisconsin, particularly in the town of Madison … there was an appointed official in that town who actually went against the will of the state legislature and created ballot drop boxes, which is basically ballot harvesting that was happening in the parks,” he said.
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After Brown noted that everything mentioned by Cawthorn had already been litigated in court and tossed by Trump-appointed judges, the 25-year-old representative veered off into vague babble.
“Indeed, I believe specifically… and this is the one that I debated on behalf of on the House floor… in Wisconsin that was never heard because they dismissed it because of standing. Now I don’t believe that is a concrete enough of a way… to dismiss it,” he said.
Asked to give specific examples of fraud, Cawthorn found himself in a corner.
“Like I said, that’s not the reason I contested the election,” he said, only digging himself deeper.
“So you wanted to throw out millions of votes without actually seeing any concrete evidence of fraud?” Brown asked. “Cause that’s what you were doing when you were contesting the election.”
After briefly squirming in silence, Cawthorn responded, “I disagree with you on that point,” and insisted he had only contested the election to “hold up the Constitution.”
Bizarrely, after Brown pointed out that Cawthorn’s own state of North Carolina had also changed election laws in connection with the coronavirus pandemic—something the GOP rep had taken issue with in Wisconsin—he admitted he was clueless about the laws in his home state.
“I’m actually not aware of the laws that were changed inside of North Carolina. I believe we had a very safe and very secure election here,” he said.
While Cawthorn had joined other Republicans in trying to block the certification of Biden’s win both before and after the deadly riots on Jan. 6, and had even praised Trump supporters gathered at the Capitol that day for the“fight” they had in them to stop “all the fraud” in the election, by the end of the Saturday night interview, his entire narrative had come crashing down around him.
“Yes I think I would say the election was not fraudulent,” he told Brown. “The Constitution allowed for us to be able to push back as much as we could and I did that to the amount of the constitutional limits that I had at my disposal, so now I would say that Joseph R. Biden is our president.”
